Energizer Duo battery charger hides a Trojan

(PhysOrg.com) -- The Energizer Duo USB battery charger has been hiding a backdoor Trojan in its software that affects computers using Windows. According to Symantec the Trojan has probably been there since 10th May 2007.

Energizer has now taken the software for the model CHUSB charger off the market and removed the site from which it could be downloaded, and the company is asking customers who downloaded the Windows version to uninstall it. There are easy steps to fight the Trojan in affected machines, and Macintosh users are not affected.

Symantec’s Director of Global Intelligence, Dean Turner, said it’s impossible to be certain the Trojan has always been in the software that monitors the Duo USB charger, but the Trojan’s binary header states it was created in May 2007. It is not known how the Trojan came to be in the software, but malware has previously been found to be hidden inside products. Energizer is working with the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) and the US government to try to find out how the code found its way into the software.

The Trojan allows an attacker to operate with the same privileges as the user who is logged in, and to remotely control the system via connections on 7777/tcp to send and receive files, run programs, and list the contents of directories.

US-CERT advises that to fix the problem, users can delete the Arucer.dll file from the Windows system32 directory, and then restart the system. An alternative fix is to remove the USB charger software. The Trojan Arucer.dll file will still be present but the code cannot be executed in the absence of the charger software. It is also advisable to block access to port 7777 using a firewall or via network perimeter devices.

Energizer’s Duo USB battery chargers have been available in the US, Europe, Asia, and Latin America since 2007. They allow computer users to recharge the Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) batteries either from a wall outlet or a USB connection. It also enabled the user to monitor the status of charging on the PC.

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When I first read this I was thinking more along the lines of "for those surprise encounters, a hidden trojan compartment".

I laughed, then I read the article. Who really uses a monitor program for a USB battery charger? It's 24 hours for a charge, so said the manual.

If you have a proper firewall running then it would block the trojan or the charger software from accessing the internet. With that being said, most people don't have a proper firewall running.

Most firewalls stop uninitiated incomming connections and ignore outgoing connections by default. Unless you've spent ten thousand on a hardware appliance, you're just as unprotected as those you look down on.